A Medium Without a Single Physical Effect

What set Piper apart from almost every other celebrated medium of her era is what she did not do. There were no rappings, no floating trumpets, no ectoplasm, no cabinet and no darkness. She sat in a lit room, went into a trance, and either spoke or wrote, at times doing both simultaneously with different claimed communicators. This mattered enormously to the investigators, because it removed at a stroke the entire apparatus of physical mediumship that had made the other cases so easy to attack: there was nothing to be rigged, and the only question was where the information came from. William James encountered her in 1885 through his mother-in-law and studied her himself before handing the work to the Society for Psychical Research, and it is Piper he had in mind in the remark about needing only one white crow to disprove the claim that all crows are black. He never said the white crow proved survival, only that it proved the blanket dismissal false, and the distinction is one his admirers frequently drop. Her career also ran on a scale that is easy to underestimate. She sat for investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for more than thirty years, produced a volume of transcript that fills a substantial run of the Society for Psychical Research's Proceedings, and was never, at any point in that period, caught doing anything improper. Whatever explains the case has to explain that duration as well as the content.